If you are new to online advertising you might not know that your ad network probably offers two different types of ad placement: search engine placement and content (contextual) advertising. Search network ads appear beside search engine results on sites like Google, Yahoo and MSN. Content ads appear on web sites with content that matches what you are advertising. Google, for instance, places content ads on sites like The New York Times Online, About.com, Business.com, and the Food Network, to name a few.
Paid search advertising and content network advertising are two very different ballgames with very different costs and performance rates. Content bids are usually much cheaper than search bids. This is true for a couple of reasons. There is usually more competition for search terms than there is for content; there is also a lot more content out on the web than there are search engine results pages. With more available inventory and less competition you can expect to pay much less for a content click than a search click. But you also get what you pay for: Internet users who click on a search ad are usually at a much different step in the buying process than someone who clicks on a content ad. Someone who is actively searching for a term is probably much further along in the purchasing process than someone browsing the web. This doesn’t mean you can’t get great results from a content campaign; it just needs to be managed differently than your search campaign.Many ad networks like Google lump both search and content targeting into a single campaign by default. The problem is that lumping both types of targeting into a single campaign doesn't allow you to set separate budgets for search and content. This often leads to content taking up too much of your budget and it can cause search to underperform. Most ad networks allow for separate term bids for both search and content, but this is often much more difficult to manage than having separate search and content campaigns. An easy way fix your lumped campaign is to run identical campaigns but break them out into search and content campaigns. Here are five simple steps to breaking out your search and content networks. 1. Make a copy of your campaign and name it “(original campaign name) – Content Only”.2. Rename your original campaign “(original campaign name) – Search Only”. 3. Disable the content network on the original campaign. 4. Disable the search network on the new campaign.5. Set ad budgets based on your current spend levels. For instance, if your daily budget of a combined campaign is $100, and you spend 75% on search and 25% on content, set the budget of your search campaign to $75 and the budget of your content campaign to $25.A quick note from behind the scenes at Clickable: Our ActEngine team is hard at work building new recommendations to optimize your spending for content ads, so watch for new developments in this area.
Trace, Clickable SEM Guru Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.
I have found this very informative as I am redoing all my adwords campaigns for christmas. Great suggestion.
Almost one-third of the SEM dollars spent with Google are spent on their content network , so we feel
So you have just compiled a large list of keywords by using a keyword suggestion tool such as Wordtracker
